inside

[arenaria]

Shell and Bell have worked out (well, Bell has worked out and Shell has tentatively commented on) a merging protocol that they think will work for them.

Shell's memories are going to be perfectly accessible, but they will not come up automatically in response to stimuli unless the resulting Shell Bell is expressly open to it. They will keep Shell's hard-earned tolerance to pain, insofar as that's separable (Shell is quite sure that she'd be able to make a pentagon if another situation as important as getting ahold of Sherlock to mint Juliet came up). All of Shell's insights about Sherlock's importance stay. Her itchy discomfort with Sherlock not getting her importance will be folded into Bell's resignation to same. The merged Shell Bell will be comfortable referring to either past in the first or third person, but will default to using "I" for Bell and "she" for Shell. She'll torch, but that's the only supernatural property Shell's bringing to the merger; she'll retain all Bell's magic. Shell looks a little older, but not much; they'll go with that, as they think torching probably conflicts with actually aging and they don't think twenty is the ideal place to sit forever and whatever Shell is supposed to be is closer. They are omitting the nightmares, good riddance.

"Last minute questions, comments, reasons to expect this to be a bad idea in some way?" Bell asks.

Shell shakes her head. She is looking forward to not being a separate person anymore.

Comments

[gunpowdergelatine]

"Yeah, I'll come up with the coin. Shell Bell, you wanna hit me, or should I wish up another one'a those agony beam gadgets?"

[she_sells_seashells]

"Do you need ramp-up or can I just slam you with a hundred thousand?" Shell Bell inquires.

[gunpowdergelatine]

He grins and makes a beckoning gesture. "Go for it."

[she_sells_seashells]

Bam. Unflavored. She holds for six seconds or until he says "when", since they'll want more than one for the merge as well as (possibly) the perma-minting.

[gunpowdergelatine]

He never bothered to wish himself another bandolier, so the coins appear directly in his hands, one two three fourfivesixseven before Shell's six seconds are up. He offers the whole handful to Golden.

[luminous_regnant]

"Thank you." (Covert declawing.) "Shell Bell, you've done a merger, perhaps you should also do this one." She wishes all but one evil onto her own bandolier and offers the other to Shell Bell. [I declawed it.]

[she_sells_seashells]

"I'll stick around long enough for them to have their parameters worked out and then I'll do it, sure," agrees Shell Bell, tucking the evil onto her chain for the meanwhile.

[temporal_affairs]

"Parameters," sighs Nathan.

"Gonna have to figure out how to square away my memories so my de-vampired Downside memories don't get completely lost against high-def surround-sound smell-o-vision," says Timer, waving a hand. "Maybe get us recall independent of vampirism like the other mint Bells have got."

"Do you want to remember being human here? Again?" asks Nathan skeptically.

"I don't see why not. We're going to fix the jealousy thing both directions, aren't we, we won't torture ourselves over - what was her name -"

"Calybrid."

"Yes, her, it won't matter, the Joker certainly doesn't mind her."

"...She's not in the -"

"I never looked her up," shrugs Timer.

"But I wasn't thinking so much of Calybrid."

"...Mmm. Okay, the kids could be a problem."

[gunpowdergelatine]

...The Joker hugs Nathan.

[she_sells_seashells]

"You could put it - away, like I did with Shell's less pleasant memories," says Shell Bell. "Of which there are terribly many. They're all accessible if I want them. They don't intrude if I don't expressly invite them, and they're muted, a little, at a sort of emotional remove."

[temporal_affairs]

"That sounds like a plan," says Timer.

"...All right," says Nathan. "What else?"

"We want to torch," says Timer. "I haven't done it, but it'd be better than dying again, according to Eights it doesn't even feel like anything by itself."

"...All right."

"Oh, and as long as we're talking about editing the mate bond, let's not edit the part where you don't care what nether bits the Joker's got at any given time, he finds that inconvenient - don't look at me like that, I might not be all magically infatuated anymore but that leaves marks, he shows up and presto-changeo and snuggles up to me, what am I supposed to do?"

"God, I don't even know. All right," says Nathan.

[gunpowdergelatine]

The Joker hugs Nathan again, rather more happily.

"I like marks," he murmurs.

[she_sells_seashells]

"I think that's enough to go on," says Shell Bell, "unless you've got anything you need to leave out explicitly from one or the other of you - I had to get rid of some nightmares, some trembling, that sort of thing."

[temporal_affairs]

"Going to be a vampire, don't get nightmares anyway," shrugs Timer.

"Yes, please do let's get this over with," Nathan sighs.

[she_sells_seashells]

Wish.

[temporal_affairs]

Nathan takes a while to adjust. (He spends this while hugging the Joker, though.)

[gunpowdergelatine]

"I love you, sweetie," he says, snuggling up. "You okay?"

[temporal_affairs]

"I'm fine, babe," says Nathan. "Kind of weird to have been a hundred years since I died one way and a few months the other, though."

[gunpowdergelatine]

He hugs him some more.

"Good."

Glancing at the Bell(a)s, he adds, "Somebody wanna perma-mint me while we're at it?"

[luminous_regnant]

Golden nods.

"...That took an evil," she says a moment later. "Why did that take an evil?"

[she_sells_seashells]

"I don't know. It probably doesn't take an evil by a lot? I wished for all of the magic I had before the merge, and torching, and I got both, one evil."

[gunpowdergelatine]

The Joker hums thoughtfully for a moment.

Then he says, "So what's the plan?"

[she_sells_seashells]

"Torturer's control has to go, and so does the power the judges have to hand it out like party favors," Shell Bell says promptly. "Some reasonable ground rules need to happen. We need a system to repatriate people to where they belong if they want to go back to their worlds or other worlds and will behave like people and not like - like Downsiders sometimes start behaving, torturers or not. We need to empty the catacombs so people aren't in limbo until some miserable self-righteous shit of a judge gets around them. We're probably going to get attention from upstairs - we need to check out Upside too, maybe it's bad in its own ways - and we need to be ready for that, we need supplies of stars and evils, we might want to see if there's another level above that if we can talk any of our respective helpers into trying, we need several of us on the ground and one or two hanging back in Milliways ready to bail us out if she's too much to handle. If she is, we need a way to just funnel people out manually and process them somewhere other than her turf. It would be good if we had a system of interworld travel that was under our own actual control, though, so we should experiment with that, see if it's something we can do with coins."

[gunpowdergelatine]

"If you wanna throw a lot of pain around, I'll catch," the Joker offers.

[luminous_regnant]

"You're clearly equipped to be an evil factory. Are you sure you want to try for a next tier?"